Russia

We will, I suspect, be reading other stories about Hillary Clinton like this one, if the mainstream media is willing to pursue them. From today’s Washington Post, under the headline “For Clinton and Boeing, a beneficial relationship”: On a trip to Moscow early in her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton played the role of international saleswoman, pressing Russian government officials to sign a multibillion-dollar deal to buy »

Yesterday there was violence in eastern Ukraine, as armed men loyal to Russia seized police stations in several cities, and the Russian flag was raised in some locations. The video below shows pro-Russian forces taking control of the police headquarters in Kramatorsk. These were not a bunch of guys from the neighborhood; this was a military operation: Ukraine’s government sent special forces to resist these encroachments in several cities, and »

We were told a few days ago that we were going to be able to resolve the Ukrainian crisis through diplomacy, because John Kerry is on the job. From the Wall Street Journal this morning: Kerry’s Talks With Russia’s Lavrov Fail to Ease Ukraine Crisis You were surprised at this news? Forget the text of the story (well okay, just this: “Mr. Kerry, in remarks after the negotiations, said he »

Fareed Zakaria attacks those who criticized John Kerry’s assertion that changing borders by force, as Russia has done and may well do again, is 19th century behavior. Zakaria relies on statistics showing that wars between nations resulted in border changes more frequently in the 19th century than in the 20th, and have done so infrequently during the second half of the 20th century. He also points out that the occurrence »

President Obama, fresh from dodging Jonathan Karl’s question about whether Mitt Romney was right in deeming Russia our number one geopolitical (Obama said “the number one national security threat to the United States” is a terrorist attack in this country, but that’s not a geopolitical threat), unloaded more fuzzy thinking on a group of students in Belgium. Obama declared: This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into. After »

When President Obama visited Russia in 2009, his hosts, as I reported at the time, found Obama laughably naive. Indeed, they were astonished to find an American president looking for things to give away to Russia in exchange for “good will.” The Russian leadership concluded, in the prophetic words of my source, that they could “steal Obama’s pants.” The Russians also had a good laugh at Obama’s imperial trappings. These »

Am I the only one who thinks that President Obama’s insistence that Russia seized Crimea out of weakness was one of the most embarrassing moments in recent diplomatic history? Michael Ramirez evaluates the great bear trainer’s performance. Click for larger file size: »

The New York Times reports that Afghanistan has become the third nation to publicly back Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The other two are Syria and Venezuela. Irony abounds. Afghans, including President Karzai, fought a ten-year war against Soviet invaders and their unpopular puppets. The U.S. assisted the Afghans in that struggle. Later, of course, the U.S. liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and installed Karzai as president. Yet now, when the »

Musing about Putin’s swallowing up Crimea back on March 5, we posited that perhaps our intelligence agencies just aren’t that intelligent. There’s a real howler in the lede of today’s Wall Street Journal front page article about the matter: U.S. military satellites spied Russian troops amassing within striking distance of Crimea last month. But intelligence analysts were surprised because they hadn’t intercepted any telltale communications where Russian leaders, military commanders »

Russian troops are amassing on the Ukrainian border. Ukraine’s foreign minister warns that the chances for a war with Russia are “growing.” But still, the Obama administration has not provided weapons, ammunition, or any other kind of military aid to Ukraine despite that government’s request for such assistance, and won’t commit to providing it. Why? In my view, the answer is that President Obama wants Ukraine to be as militarily »

It is not difficult to get a fix on Barack Obama’s view of the world. It is the view of the leftover left that took the side of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Obama seems not to have changed his views or to have learned anything since his days as a college student in which he performed as a “useful idiot” for the Soviet Union. A year ago, »

President Obama declared today that the U.S. will not take military action in Ukraine. I think most of us had worked that out. “What we are going to do,” Obama declared “is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message.” The clear message will be this — please, please don’t invade more territory. In ruling out military »

To date, Team Obama’s response to Russia’s takeover of Crimea has been criminally lame. But now Susan Rice reportedly wants to take affirmative action. Unfortunately, the affirmative action she contemplates is affirmative action in the legal sense — affirmative action on behalf of women. The post of U.S. ambassador to Russia has been vacant for three weeks. Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports “we’re hearing that national security adviser »

Don’t look now, but negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are about to begin again. The New York Times writes: Tensions between the West and Russia over events in Ukraine have cast a shadow over the second round of talks set to begin on Tuesday in Vienna on a permanent nuclear agreement with Iran. Although the talks have no direct connection to Ukraine, their success hinges on solidarity among »

In the course of the Democratic primaries in 2008 Barack Obama provoked me into assessing his reading of the Cold War and the uses of diplomacy. I took a look in “The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies.” Meeting with JFK in Vienna in 1961 at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev sized up Kennedy as a weakling and a lightweight. Kennedy lamented: “I never met a man like this,” Kennedy »

Commentators with a cruel memory have recalled the moment from one of the 2012 presidential debates when President Obama cited Mitt Romney’s warning about the growing threat from Russia and dismissed it with a superficially sophisticated putdown: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” When I hear President Obama threatening to impose consequences on Vladimir Putin et al., or imposing them, as he did today, »

The Obama administration has sanctioned eleven Russian and Ukrainian officials. All are cronies of and/or senior advisers to Vladimir Putin. I’m in favor of sanctioning Putin’s advisers and cronies. But no one should confuse these measures with action that has any chance of influencing Putin’s behavior. Certainly, there is no such confusion in Russia. Greg White, Moscow Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, reports that Russian markets, “relieved” by »